A Falcon 9 rocket carrying an ocean-monitoring satellite became the first blastoff of 2016 from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Sunday, but the booster’s much-heralded landing on a sea-faring platform didn’t end as successfully.
Liftoff of the Space Exploration Technologies rocket occurred at 10:42 a.m. from Space Launch Complex-4 at South Base.
Fog hampered viewing the departure as thousands of people gathered at vantage points around the Lompoc Valley. The rumble could be heard across the Central Coast.
More than an hour after launch, the Jason-3 satellite successfully separated from the rocket, deployed its solar arrays and communicated with ground stations, prompting applause from the crew in a NASA control center.
“It’s a tremendous amount of work to get to a day like today, but it’s nice when you can celebrate your successes,” said Tim Dunn, NASA launch manager.
While the primary purpose of the launch called for carrying the Jason-3 satellite, a secondary mission involved trying to land the first stage on a barge 200 miles away, believed to be a first following a West Coast blastoff.
The autonomous barge carried SpaceX’s logo as the bull’s-eye and the words, “Just read the instructions.”
“As we touched down it was a slightly harder landing than we expected, and it looks like one of the landing legs may have broken as we touched down on the droneship,” a SpaceX representative said Sunday.
“I’d like to emphasize that we are on target. We did hit our intended goal and we are going to take a lot of data from this.”
Later, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Twitter, “Definitely harder to land on a ship. Similar to an aircraft carrier vs land: much smaller target area, that’s also translating & rotating.”
“However, that was not what prevented it being good. Touchdown speed was OK, but a leg lockout didn’t latch, so it tipped over after landing,” he said later.
“After further data review, stage landed softly but leg 3 didn’t lockout. Was within 1.3 meters of droneship center.”
SpaceX has conducted unsuccessful barge landings following launches from the East Coast before achieving a successful touchdown on land last month in Florida. The firm is seeking environmental approvals to return the first stages to land at Vandenberg after Falcon launches.
Musk maintained his sense of humor, joking of a picture of the first stage resting on its side on the platform, “Well, at least the pieces were bigger this time!”
Jason-3 is U.S.-European mission with approximately $180 million paid by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and nearly the same amount shared between the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites and CNES, the French space agency, officials said.
Liftoff came after seven years of preparations for the newest mission to measure rising sea levels, according to Laury Miller, Jason-3 program scientist and chief from the NOAA Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry.
Earth has entered “a new norm” marked by rapid changes to the planet’s system, he said.
“What may not be widely understood is the role of the ocean in this complex process,” Miller added.
The Jason-3 data is expected to be helpful in global climate change monitoring since more than 90 percent of the heat now being trapped in Earth’s system due to the greenhouse effect goes into the ocean.
“This makes the ocean, perhaps, the biggest player in the climate change story, but it also helps explain the importance of the Jason mission,” Miller said. “Because Jason allows us to get the big picture in terms of sea-level change in the years to come.”
The “turbo-charged” El Niño and out-of-season tornadoes may seem like unrelated events but actually are linked to changes in the ocean half a world away, Miller said.
“Jason information is incredibly useful, especially to NOAA, because it allows us to not only track sea-level change that is impacting our coastal features right now but also to help forecast extreme weather,” he said.
The data helps with forecasting hurricane intensity, developing high seas wave warnings and tracking oil spills.
Jason-3 will build on decades of climate change data collected by sibling satellites since the early 1990s.
“Jason-3, much like its predecessor Jason-2, will be able to measure the height of the ocean in an area that’s about six miles across from 800 miles up with an accuracy of about one inch, so about the width of a quarter,” said Josh Willis, NASA project scientist for Jason-3 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
“It’s really quite an amazing feat.”
The spacecraft, boasting a radar altimeter as its primary instrument, will undergo about six months of checkout before it officially begins operating. This will include Jason-3 flying in formation with Jason-2 while scientists calibrate the newest satellite’s instruments.
Sunday’s launch marked the first NASA mission on a Falcon rocket and the second Falcon rocket launch from Vandenberg, which is poised to have a busy year of blastoffs in 2016.
— Noozhawk North County editor Janene Scully can be reached at jscully@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
